Friday, June 28, 2013

Dragonball Evolution (2009)

Based on the highly popular manga series Dragon Ball
by Akira Toriyama, Dragonball Evolution
is a bastardization as well as an insult. Anyone who loved good ol’ Dragonball
more than likely would despise this film – yet, there’s something ridiculously
entertaining about the whole thing. When it comes to what makes a film bad, it
almost always comes down to execution: Dragonball
Evolution manages to actually have good cinematography, entertaining
moments, colorful design, and a general sense of fun. However, it also has bad
acting, bad scripting, and less than stellar special effects (some of the
practical effects are fine, though).

Dragonball
Evolution (why is it called that?) tells the story of Goku
(played by Justin Chatwin), who basically has to save the world from the evil
Piccolo (James Marsters) and gather the seven Dragon Balls which will grant
anyone one who has them one perfect wish. The rest of the story and its details
are, as one might expect, not at all important or necessary to talk about in a
review. Sure, I could talk about Goku’s love interest Chi-Chi (played by Jamie
Chung, who’s attractiveness is one of the film’s strengths), about his
grandfather (Randall Duk Kim), and other pointless stuff, but that would mean
actually talking about the story (which doesn’t do this film any favors), so
instead, I’ll point out moments that either showed the film’s strengths or
weaknesses.

The beginning is nice, showing some insight into
Goku’s high school life and how cliché the bullies are (dur hur lameo). These
are actually some of the best moments in the film, especially when Goku goes to
Chi-Chi’s party and opens a can of whoop ass. Other neat moments are when the
characters are in that place with the tournament and temple (I can’t find or remember the
location’s name for some reason). Chow Yun-fat as Master Roshi in himself is
always entertaining, appearing to have a lot of fun in the role. There’s also
an editing technique used early in the film that I found particularly cool.

So where does the film do wrong? In the most
important of places: Acting & Scripting. The acting is the most noticeable
problem of the two, but I guess it wouldn’t be there without the bad script,
either. Awkward moments, terrible dialogue, and strange plot points are at full
display. I call out Emmy Rossum (Bulma Briefs) and Joon Park (Yamcha)
specifically for her bad acting and his lame dialogue (though I guess his
acting isn’t much better). It’s amazing that Justin Chatwin is one of the
better actors here – in fact, he’s one of the most likeable characters (for me,
anyway). The best actors are obviously Chow Yun-fat and Randall Duk Kim. Here’s
the rest of the problem, though: These characters have odd dialogue a lot of
the time, the film itself has odd pacing, and a bizarre plot that made me
question the entire premise within the first two minutes.

It may not be the easiest thing to specify why, but
I know for sure that Dragonball Evolution
is not a good movie. I could blame it on the acting, the script as a whole, the
disgrace it is to the source material, but in the end, all I’m able to really
muster is that it’s a bad movie – not an awful one, not an unwatchable one
(it’s actually entertaining largely for its badness), but just a bad one. It
didn’t fail in its premise at all: I asked for an entertaining, pointless, bad
looking film and by God I got one. But that’s the biggest problem of all: It
had no reason to be made whatsoever.